MOTHS AND BUTTERFLIES. I79 



as well in the highest as the lowest classes, and would 

 seem to be something more than a mere freak of na- 

 ture. The daughter of a hair dresser, in Paris, on ac- 

 count of her extraordinary merits, was made by Lou- 

 is XV., Duchess of Dubarry, with an annual income 

 of a hundred thousand dollars, and the same indi- 

 vidual when eighty years old, was brought on a butch- 

 er's cart, clad in rags, to the scaffold where she was be- 

 headed. Catherine I., reigning Empress of Eussia, 

 who knew not how either to read or to write, was in 

 her youth a servant girl. And so hundreds of others 

 who began life in obscurity have ended it in the high- 

 est stations of wealth and rank. 



But the metarmorphosis of Butterflies and moths, 

 has always been a subject of interesting contempla- 

 tion, and of profound analogical reasoning, and has 

 ever been considered the true type of man's exist- 

 ence here, and his brighter and happier life hereafter. 

 In the most ancient times, it probably gave Origin 

 and strength to the belief in the transmigration of 

 souls, metampsycose, as also to a thousand fabulous 

 stories and fairy tales, in the same manner as the an- 

 nual casting of the skin of snakes, by which process 

 that reptile appears every spring in a new dress of 

 bright and glittering colors, has given rise, even in 

 the remotest antiquity to the idea of regeneration, 

 and endless life hereafter. 



Caterpillars, notwithstanding their beauty, are very 



